Tomáš Absolon and Milan Vagač transform SPOT Gallery in Prague into a hybrid ecosystem where colour, structure and digital sensibility merge into ever-evolving painterly organisms.
The exhibition curated by Michal Stolárik unfolds like a controlled fever dream, where painterly matter behaves as if it had absorbed the rhythms of a digital organism. Absolon’s chromatic exuberance swirls in vectors that feel half-engineered, half-feral, while Vagač’s relief-like structures anchor the space with a slower, tectonic pulse. Installed together, their works propose a hybrid ecosystem in which the organic and the synthetic are not opposites but co-conspirators. One almost senses a greenhouse for images—yet its photosynthesis runs on algorithms, muscle memory and sonic vibration rather than biological necessity.
Absolon’s canvases read like mutant diagrams of emotion and movement. Their candy-coloured elongations slip between figuration and signage, never quite stabilising. The motifs—tubular limbs, pollen-like dots, tendrils that behave like animated glyphs—seem to bloom in real time, as if the surface were a screen registering continuous updates. Despite the digital undertones, the works are unmistakably painterly: airbrushed atmospheres collide with assertive strokes, generating a visual syntax that is playful but rarely naïve. The paintings behave like avatars caught mid-morph, their identities still buffering.
In contrast, Vagač develops a sculptural approach to the painted surface, crafting panels that resemble archaeological fragments from a future civilisation. Their recessed cavities and flowing contours evoke industrial mouldings, spacecraft interiors, or the softened edges of sci-fi architecture. The muted palette enhances their enigmatic presence; each panel feels like an interface waiting for activation. Yet these works are not cold. They hum with a quiet sensuality, their forms repeating and mutating as though governed by an internal evolutionary script.
When encountered together, the artists’ idioms begin to cross-pollinate. Absolon’s buoyancy throws Vagač’s austerity into relief, while Vagač’s weight grounds Absolon’s exuberance. The exhibition’s choreography reinforces this interplay: bursts of colour flare against the neutrality of the grey panels; the episodic nature of both practices creates a rhythm of emergence and recession. In the gallery’s central hall, the black, spine-like floor sculptures echo Vagač’s language and, unexpectedly, provide a counterpoint to Absolon’s floating motifs—tethering the entire presentation to the ground while still whispering of propulsion.
The serial logic underpinning both practices becomes a key to reading the show. Patterns repeat, but never mechanically; each iteration suggests an organism testing new configurations. This repetition-with-mutability allows the viewer to perceive subtle shifts—an aperture opening slightly wider, a colour mutating toward electric intensity, a gesture acquiring a new directional thrust. These works don’t merely depict growth; they behave as though they are performing it. The effect is cumulative: familiar shapes begin returning like memories whose origins we cannot quite place.
Ultimately, Bloom reveals itself not as a narrative exhibition but as a sensorial grammar lesson in how images come into being. Absolon and Vagač treat the canvas as both environment and instrument, a site where intuition negotiates with system, where digital logic infiltrates analogue touch. Their works blossom not toward a fixed conclusion but toward a state of perpetual becoming. Standing amid their hybrid flora, one senses that representation itself is evolving—driven by forces that are at once personal, technological and quietly cosmic.
